The heuristic that evolved around S

The heuristic that evolved around Shannon’s choice does not make clear the difference between informational entropy and ther-modynamic entropy. On the contrary, since the point of the heuristic is to justify Shannon’s choice, differences between informational and thermodynamic entropy are suppressed in favor of similarities. But as in the case of metaphors, the differences are not negligible. They put a torque on the heuristic which twists the way entropy is under-stood. This torque registers itself as a perturbation in the language of the commentators, as they struggle to suture the gap created by difference without ever quite acknowledging that there is a gap. Warren Weaver was Shannon’s first, and perhaps most important, commentator.18 His explanation for the correlation of information with disorder rather than order set a precedent that other commen-tators would follow for at least twenty years. Reasoning that if a message is perfectly ordered, the receiver will be able to guess what it will say, Weaver suggests that a “noisy” message will be more surprising and hence will convey more information. He is now in a quandary, for by this reasoning gibberish should convey the maxi-mum possible information. To close off this possibility, Weaver in-troduces a distinction between desirable and useless information. True, gibberish is maximum information. But since it is not desired, it does not really count as information. Hence the maximum amount of information is conveyed by a message that is partly surprising and partly anticipated.